U. S. government

Across the last six years of economic slowdown, America’s urban areas have experienced a rise in the concentration of violence and the use of illegal firearms therein. In fact, as city violence increases, so to does the apparent presence of guns on the street. The prevalence of firearms in urban settings, and especially in poorer communities, is both extensive and ignored by the general public. With guns in such heavy circulation and their use increasingly valued by those in such areas who wish to protect themselves and their families, it would be a formidable task to attempt to purge America’s streets of handguns.

This is particularly true because there are so many of them out there that are unaccounted for either by serial registration or legal purchase. The popularity of guns in addition to the difficulty which the government has had in tracking their ownership has established a trend in which the quantity of guns today on the streets is impossible to estimate and even more impossible to contain. This has initiated a social circumstance in which the increase in America’s trends of gun violence has far outpaced any legislative efforts to curb it.

There is no apparent end in sight, then, of the continuing problem facing urban communities. Though it may never be possible to eliminate gun ownership in American, and perhaps not even desirable, it is still absolutely essential that local, state and federal authorities work together to craft laws that can change the course of violence in the United States. The U. S. Constitution, the prevailing doctrine in the establishment of our union, states in the second amendment that all Americans possess the inviolable right to bear arms.

As a country founded on revolutionary terms and forged in the midst of extreme violence, it was recognized by the Founding Fathers that Americans require protection against all manner of tyranny. In the case of the War for Independence, widespread ownership of guns was crucial to the defense which colonists were able to pitch against the British. As an extension, it was also there recognized that Americans had a right to bear arms as a first line security against domestic tyranny, either at the hands of fellow citizens or even a government overstepping its boundaries.

Naturally, it would be difficult today to conjure a circumstance in which it would be considered Constitutionally acceptable to employ armed resistance against the U. S. government. But the theoretical underpinnings of the 2nd Amendment are important to understanding the importance of its preservation. Such is to note that the United States is given over culturally to an acceptance and even embrace of firearm ownership.

Deeply stitched into the fabric of our history as well as intensely relevant to the nature of our comparably violent society today, is the common sense that the right to bear arms is tantamount to the preservation of personal liberty. This is a view which is espoused by a statistically significant portion of the voting population as well. Indeed, “America remains one of the world's leading gun markets. Private citizens are believed to own 200 million firearms, a third of them handguns, and the industry, with revenues estimated between $1. 4 billion and $2. 5 billion annually, distributes several million new guns each year” (Anderson, 27)